Sanjay Purohit, Chief Curator, Societal Platform EkStep Foundation
Sanjay has over 30 years of diverse and global experience across the corporate and societal development sectors.
Podcast
Overview
The EkStep Foundation was co-founded by Nandan Nilekani, Rohini Nilekani, and Shankar Maruwadato. It was dedicated to addressing the challenge at scale, leading to its Mission EkStep.
Our guest today on TBCY is Sanjay Purohit, the curator of the Societal Platform, which is doing an outstanding job in tackling various challenges from education to healthcare to urbanization.
About Sanjay Purohit
Sanjay is the chief curator of the societal platform Ekstep Foundation which works on systemic methods to resolve complex societal challenges with speed and sustainably. He has worked for corporations for the last three decades and is passionate about mentoring start-up entrepreneurs. Since 2016, at EkStep Foundation, he is leading the evolution of Societal Platform Thinking, an innovative method to resolve complex societal challenges with speed, at scale, and sustainably. He advises multiple social entrepreneurs who are developing Societal Platforms in domains such as education, financial inclusion, healthcare, urban governance, and livelihoods.Â
Discussion-Â
What is EkStep Foundation?Â
Nandan Nilekani, Rohini Nilekani and Shankar Maruwada co-founded EkStep Foundation. the primary objective of the foundation is to allow societal change at scale. The foundation works in different areas including education, digital public technologies and is planning to dive into large changes using systemic methods and platform thinking.
 “I think I am connecting what lots of people are bringing through their lived experiences”
Can you elaborate on the “systemic method to resolve complex societal challenges”? What are some of these complex challenges?
Sanjay Purohit mentions sustainable development goals, human development indicators, healthcare, sanitation, urbanisation, education etc under the many challenges. He says that in a country like India with a vast population, the challenges are complex and dynamic due to the changing policies and political nature of the country. So, “it’s hard to drive change in a large, complex and dynamic situation.” The foundation is working on these challenges and finding a way to resolve them.Â
One example of a challenge Ekstep is working to solve
Sanjay Purohit gives the example of education to explain how they work. They found that two schools may have exactly the same facilities, geography, faculty of teachers etc but vary greatly in performance. the reason they found out to be in the leadership of the schools. Why does one school do extremely well while the other doesn’t? The answer turned out to be in who is leading the school, their ability of entrepreneurship and their ability to get community support, organise resources, etc makes a massive difference. So the question was how to solve this issue and after spending a lot of time, they came to the conclusion that teachers need four important capabilities-
- ability to sense what’s happening in and beyond the classroom
- ability to compare and analyze their performance with other schools
- ability to learn how to solve the identified challenges
- ability to make improvements after they have learner what to do
The foundation created a technology to reach as many schools in India and work to make sense, and improve and develop leadership programs which are now scaling rapidly and have brought positive results in many schools.Â
